The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

Set in Yorkshire in 1952, The Virgin in the Garden tells the story of the Potter family and of those who surround them. The eldest daughter, Stephanie, is a brilliant Cambridge graduate who frustrated her family’s expectations of her by coming back to her home town to teach at a grammar school. She further disappoints her intolerant father by falling in love with the local vicar, Daniel Orton.

The second daughter, seventeen-year-old rebellious Frederica, is madly in love with Alexander Wedderburn, a young colleague of her father’s at the English department. To celebrate the coronation of a new Queen, Alexander wrote a verse play about Elizabeth I, and Frederica badly wants to be cast for it. She also wants everyone around her to stop seeing her as a child, and she's impatient to grow up and gain knowledge of the world in general and of sexuality in particular.

Finally, we have sixteen-year-old Marcus, a mathematic prodigy who lost his abilities when he tried to explain them to his father. Marcus is approached by an obsessive teacher, Lucas Simmonds, and what begins as an experiment ends up turning into an intense and awkward friendship with consequence for the two.

I picked up The Virgin in the Garden without quite knowing what it was about, and now that I’ve read it I understand why. It’s really very difficult to explain what this book is about. I haven’t felt this way since I read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – not that the books have much in common beyond the fact that both are set in academic contexts.

I suppose I could say that The Virgin in the Garden is about literature and growing up and love and desire and life. I read this book very slowly—not only because it’s longish, and because I’ve been doing other things, but also because it’s a dense book, best savoured over time. It’s very much full of literary allusions – to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Ovid, to D.H. Lawrence, to T.S. Eliot, and so on. In fact, some of the chapters are named after other novels or poems or plays, like “Women in Love”, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, “Good Wives”, etc.

A.S. Byatt’s writing – more so in her novels than in her short stories, I think – is very much cerebral. I actually hate this word, and normally you wouldn’t catch me using it, but I really can’t think of a better one. Yet the reason why I enjoy it so much is that it’s passionate and readable at the same time. Reading her books is such a pleasure for me. Despite being somewhat dense, they don’t feel like work, and they don’t strike me as pretentious in the least. When her characters, many of them academics or writers themselves, make references to other works, I don’t feel like she’s doing it to be literary or whatever. I feel like she’s doing it as a nod to other authors she, or her characters, truly admire and are passionate about. And being so passionate about literature myself, how can I not love that?

I guess I could say that The Virgin in the Garden is a character-oriented novel, and yet a lot happens in it plot-wise. The only problem is that I felt that all three storylines are supposed to be intense, yet I couldn’t help but feel more interested in one, Stephanie’s, at the expense of the others. But despite this, and despite how long it took me to read it, I never actually grew impatient with the book. The Virgin in the Garden is not something everyone would like, and I’d rather recommend The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye or Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice as an introduction to Byatt. But I found this book absolutely charming.

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